Fan Speed monitoring

brd

Guest

Recently I moved a server into a proper cabinet with doors. After a few days I noticed the fans were spinning up and down. So I started investigating ways to monitor the fan speed. I figured having a graph of them long term would give me a nice way to show changes in the environment, beyond the temperature monitoring I am already doing.

I was not having much luck searching the Internet. Luckily, Darius on IRC pointed me to a project called bsdhwmon by Jeremy Chadwick, a fellow FreeBSD Developer. The server is running an older Supermicro X7SBi motherboard with a Winbond 83627HG chip which is listed on the supported page of bsdhwmon.

It is important to remember to add the kernel modules to be loaded at boot. Adding the following to /boot/loader.conf will take care of that:
smb_load="YES"
ichsmb_load="YES"
Note that ichsmb will load smbus, but not the smb kernel driver.